The human body experiences stress due to a wide range of physiological and psychological external stimuli. Stress enables an active physiological response of the body to the external stimuli in a timely fashion. However, an abnormal increase in stress may compromise long-term health and disrupt the body's ability to respond to events that require a quick physical response, such as quickly pulling a hand away from a hot flame.
In a call center environment, agents often experience stress when communicating with customers for various reasons. For example, agents may experience stress when dealing with irate customers, or when the agent's role is either in conflict or ambiguous. Agent role conflict occurs when an agent has conflicting objectives to meet, such as where the agent is evaluated on the number of calls answered in a day. However, the agent may be simultaneously expected to resolve each caller's query/concern, which may result in calls lasting longer and thus decreasing the number of calls answered in a day. Agent role ambiguity occurs when the agent is either unaware of an appropriate action for a customer query, or lacks sufficient information for resolving the query. For example, customer complaints are usually related to inherent issues with respect to a client's product or service, over which the agent has little or no control (e.g., outage in access to a website due to annual maintenance). In another example, the agent may not have enough information to resolve a customer concern (e.g., the troubleshooting manual does not cover a particular type of problem).